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Secret Service bought location data pulled from common apps:
The Secret Service paid a private company for access to location data generated by common smartphone apps, Motherboard reports. Internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request show that the agency spent $35,844 for a one-year subscription to Babel Street's product Locate X, which tracks the location of devices via data harvested from popular apps.
As Motherboard notes, the glaring issue with this contract is that it allows the law enforcement agency to buy information that it would normally need a warrant or a court order to obtain.
[...] In March, Protocol reported that US Customs and Border Protection purchased Locate X, and a former Babel Street employee told Protocol that the Secret Service and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were using the location-tracking tech. But Motherboard has the first confirmation that the Secret Service did in fact purchase Locate X.
[...] Senator Ron Wyden is reportedly planning legislation to block law enforcement from purchasing products like Locate X.
"It is clear that multiple federal agencies have turned to purchasing Americans' data to buy their way around Americans' Fourth Amendment Rights. I'm drafting legislation to close this loophole, and ensure the Fourth Amendment isn't for sale," Wyden said in a statement provided to Motherboard.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 19 2020, @03:26PM
Because, everyone reads every word of a EULA, a TOS, the privacy policies, etc ad nauseum. Worse, all of that legal mumbo jumbo doesn't explicitly spell out the fact that your data is sold for profit to the highest bidder.
I made mention in another discussion of visiting the American Heart Association's site, to look at using one of their health monitoring tools. All free of course. I clicked the privacy policy link, which few people probably do. It mentioned "partners", and sharing of information, blah blah blah. I learned that AHA can "share" information with just about anyone in the world, at their discretion, and that I had no rights to monitor such "sharing". It wasn't a 30 second read, either - I spent minutes reading, and finally just closed AHA's page, and got the hell out of there.
Why in hell does AHA, of all organizations, need to "share" my information with ANYONE? That data should only be shared with other organizations that I explicitly approve of, such as my personal healthcare provider(s).